


He Who Goes To Bed Hungry

by samalander



Category: ST:AOS - Fandom
Genre: Bonding, Cooking, Depression, Family, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Pancakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-08
Updated: 2011-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winona makes dinner with her son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Who Goes To Bed Hungry

**Author's Note:**

> For the [](http://where-no-woman.livejournal.com/profile)[**where_no_woman**](http://where-no-woman.livejournal.com/) Mother’s Day Challenge. Prompt #27: "Teaching Jim (or Sam, or both) to cook."
> 
> For the sake of clarity: The pancakes Winona is making are my father’s recipe and thoroughly the Northern American version of the food; fluffy, cakey, thick. Do not confuse with their European cousins, you will be confused.
> 
> Title from a Maltese proverb; "He who goes to bed hungry dreams of pancakes."
> 
> Betaed by [](http://rowena742.livejournal.com/profile)[**rowena742**](http://rowena742.livejournal.com/) , cheerled by [](http://theoreticalpixy.livejournal.com/profile)[**theoreticalpixy**](http://theoreticalpixy.livejournal.com/) and [](http://emmypenny.livejournal.com/profile)[**emmypenny**](http://emmypenny.livejournal.com/). All three of you are heroes, and I appreciate all you do.

Today is a Good Day for Winona, and Good Days are harder to come by than she'd like.

She's in the kitchen, at the sink, peeling carrots for - well, she hasn't decided what they're for yet, but the act of peeling, the smooth blade working away the wrinkled, marred skin to reveal something smooth and clean beneath is somehow calming for her. Winona likes carrots and cucumbers, potatoes and corn, the things that get better as you take bits off. She supposes on some level, she identifies with them, but she tries not to think too hard about it.

Thinking too hard leads to crying, and she hates that part.

The front door swings open, and her boys thunder into the house: ten-year-old Sam and seven-year-old Jimmy, sweet and innocent and fucking filthy on the outside, like potatoes.

"If you two track mud, I swear to God-" she calls out, and the little boy voices echo their apologies into the kitchen, followed by the solid thumps of the shoes by the door.

Sam precedes Jimmy into the kitchen, freckles prominent across his nose from the sun, and she smiles at them both. "You two getting into trouble?"

Jimmy's laugh is like tinkling silver bells, and she glances at his too-blue eyes as Sam steals a carrot from the cutting board.

"What are you making?" Jimmy asks, because he's small and can't see over the counter. Winona shrugs.

"What do you want me to be making?"

Jimmy grins and it takes her breath away how much he looks like George in some moments. "Spaghetti-Os," he says, with all the gravity of someone asked to solve the problems of the Universe. Spaghetti-Os are serious business, when you're seven.

Winona laughs because Jimmy is cute, but she doesn't like feeding the boys canned food and they haven't quite gotten around to having a replicator installed, though she swears every time she opens one of those cans that she will. It's just that sometimes it's the only thing she has energy to make, there are days when even things like lifting the can opener and stirring the pot seem like years of hard labor. And she knows Sam sees it, knows he's old enough to know what the bags under her eyes are, old enough to know that the sounds he hears at night aren't coyotes crying; it's her. He's crawled into her bed before, one dark and lonely night, and let her hold onto him because he was the only tangible thing in the universe. She still doesn't know how he knew to do that, and she doesn't know how to ask a question like that to a ten-year-old.

"I'm not making Spaghetti-Os," she tells Jimmy, who is now straining to peek over the counter. "But tell you what. Go wash your hands; you boys can help me make dinner."

Sam rolls his eyes and declines, opting to go and stare at the tridee with his mouth open as queued episodes of "The Wild Adventures of Clint Baker" scroll past his retinas. Winona knows Sam watches too much tridee and he sits too close to it while he does, but she lets him because he does well enough in school and there are some fights she knows she'll never win.

Jimmy is making a mess at the sink, splashing water around as he washes his hands like a cyclone. She smiles, and picks up a knife to run through the carrots. They're rough and uneven, but they're not meant for looks. She takes a small clear bowl and puts a centimeter of water at the bottom before arranging the carrot sticks in it.

"These are for snacking," she tells Jimmy, who's come back to join her. "Never cook when you're too hungry; the flavors change."

It's bullshit, but he nods and she resists the urge to ruffle his hair. She opts instead to hold out a carrot, which he takes with fingers still a little pudgy from his fading babyhood. She can see the heartbreakers her sons will both be, in their own ways. Sam has her coloring and his father's bone structure, he'll be handsome in a rugged and rough way once he gets past the spottiness and the braces that are sure to come. And Jimmy has George's coloring and her own thin frame, and those eyes that don't come from either of them. Even when he hits gawky awkwardness, even when he's thirteen and still navigating deodorant, she knows her youngest son will be handsome. But now he's seven and she's still the prettiest girl he knows, and he's munching on that carrot like it holds joy.

She smiles, feels the warmth that comes with the boys flood her system, and turns to the fridge. She keeps a few things handy - mostly basic ingredients, because when she likes to cook, she likes to really cook. It's not hard to choose what she needs for tonight - milk and eggs and butter get pulled out to sit on the counter, joined by flour and baking soda and salt, with a bag of chocolate chips to the side. She contemplates a carton of middle-aged blueberries, but decides that none of them will want that over chocolate, and lets them sit. She turns to grin at Jimmy.

"Pancakes," she says, and his eyes grow wide.

"For dinner?"

"Pancakes are good for every meal," she tells him matter-of-factly, and it's true. On her first date with George, at a little diner near the academy grounds, he'd ordered blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon and she'd laughed and ordered a burger. When the food had come, she found herself jealous of the mound of fluffy goodness before him, her food looking pale and boring in comparison. But that was the kind of man George was, the kind of men she hopes her boys will be: ones who know what they want no matter what conventional wisdom might say.

Winona pulls the measuring cups out, the ones George had insisted they register for because his family needed a registry or they'd end up with insane gifts, so she picked out measuring cups in the shape of starships and sheets with Elvis on them and a lamp that looked like the NX-01. They were all impractical, but so much about her life with George had been gleefully impractical, like sense was a luxury that newlyweds couldn't afford. She misses every goddamn second of nonsense.

Winona grins and helps Jimmy roll up his sleeves, kissing him on the forehead as she slips a red and black checked apron - "OVER THE HILL AND LOVING IT" - over his t-shirt and tying it behind his back. He pulls over a chair from the table, scraping the kitchen floor, as she grabs bowls and cups and spoons and skillets from the cabinets. She watches him climb up to stand on the seat and she thinks, if this becomes a thing for them, she'll have to get him a stool, something to make the whole bit more comfortable for the both of them.

"There's something very important we do," she says, looking at Jimmy's painfully earnest face, and she regrets that she doesn't have the energy to do this - or anything, really - with him more often. "Before we start, we count our fingers. I have ten. You?"

Jimmy dutifully ticks off each digit, thumb to thumb, and holds up his hands when he's done. "Ten." Winona sometimes wonders that he's such a shy, serious child, but according to Tiberius, George was one, too. He didn't turn into a daredevil until he hit puberty. Sam's more like she was; he's been itching to fly since he could walk, and she knows that sooner or later he'll be leaving Riverside in a trail of dust. She hopes Jimmy does the same.

But for now she nods and tells him to remember the number, pressing a finger to her lips when he asks why, and turns to the counter.

"One cup of flour," she tells her son, holding up the measuring cup, which he scrambles to take as she opens the flour container with her thumbprint. She puts her hands over his as he scoops, steadying the timid shake of weaker muscles, and if an amount of flour ends up on the counter, well. That's how these things go.

They repeat the motions with each ingredient, the dry and then the wet. She tells Jimmy how much, and guides his hands, making sure that the majority of it ends up in the bowl. She shows him how to crack the eggs into a smaller bowl, how to check for shell. She quietly thanks the rooster for not leaving any red yolks, because she's not sure how to tell Jimmy what those are without scarring him for life.

When everything is in the bowl, she grins at him. "Wanna stir?"

He nods like he does everything - with energy and excitement - and she turns on the stove, heating the pan while keeping an eye on Jimmy, to make sure he doesn't end up wearing the batter. It would be just like him, really, her little pancake child.

As Jimmy stirs he presses his tongue against his bottom lip in concentration - this is some kind of Herculean task for him, it seems, the act of Stirring and Not Spilling. Winona watches the batter thicken under his hands, ducking into the living room as he works to tell Sam to move back from the damn boob cube and ask if he wants blueberries or chocolate chips.

She needn't have asked. Her boys both have her sweet tooth.

Winona fetches a ladle from the drawer when the batter is ready and the skillet is hot, and she shows Jimmy how to spoon the little pools into the pan and then sprinkle the chocolate chips over top. He laughs as the batter spreads out, but the giggles turn to horror when the edges brush, forming his perfect pancakes into some kind of Venn diagram of disappointment and sorrow.

Winona laughs and uses the spatula to separate them, but Jimmy still looks stricken.

"Pancakes should be _round_ ," he tells her, as if this is something everyone should know.

She smiles, her "Oh, really?" grin that she doesn't use so much now that George isn't around to tell her hilarious lies, and reaches into a drawer.

She comes up with a cookie cutter: one Tiberius gave her for her birthday, in the shape of Texas, where she was born.

"Watch," she tells Jimmy, "we'll make all sorts of shapes."

The ones in the pan are starting to bubble on top, and she shows Jimmy how to flip them, sliding the spatula under and moving her wrist. She won't let him do that yet; he's too little to have a good grip. Still, he seems entranced by the way the brown coloring creeps up the sides of the batter as they cook, and she loves his innocent joy.

When first two are done, she lays the cookie cutter on the griddle and pours batter into it, Jimmy's dubious eyes following her every movement. "You know what state this is?" she asks him, and he nods.

"Texas," she supplies, when he doesn't answer, and she points to a point somewhere close to pancake-Houston. "This is where your mommy grew up, where her daddy, your Grandpa Fetcher, taught me to make pancakes."

Jimmy considers this as the bubbles begin to form in the batter. "Were they shaped like Iowa?"

Winona laughs; she's not totally sure she could picture Iowa's shape without a map, though she's sure it's vaguely squarish. "No," she tells Jimmy, lifting the cookie cutter because she's pretty sure the edges have set. It runs a little, but her father had always said that pancakes were duty-bound to taste better than they look, so she lets it slide. "But I bet we could find a cookie cutter and _make_ Iowa pancakes."

Jimmy ponders for a long moment, and then nods. "Can we make Iowa cookies, too?"

"Of course we can."

They continue the way they have been- Jimmy pours the batter and sprinkles the chips, Winona flips, and they laugh. Before she knows it, they're out of batter and the plate is high with fluffy, misshapen cakes, and Jimmy has managed to not only ignore the carrots, but eat almost the entire bag of chocolate chips when she wasn't looking.

She gives him a playful swat on his bottom and tells him to wash up again as she gets bacon and some strawberries and syrup and juice out of the fridge.

"Tell your brother to set the table," Winona says, and Jimmy goes while she begins to fry the bacon and slice the berries. By the time the boys have things arranged, she's ready too, and she smiles tiredly as they begin to bicker over who gets the Texas pancake. She should have made two, she should always make two of everything, but instead she cuts it in half and tells them to quit it.

Her voice is harsher than she wants it to be when she stops the fighting. She hates yelling at the boys, hates that sometimes she can't stop herself from being harsh with them, but then Sam flicks a strawberry at Jimmy and even if she has to reprimand him, she's still glad they act like normal little boys.

"Mommy?"

Winona looks up, remembering suddenly that she hasn't taken any food for herself, and she needs to keep up her strength. "Yeah, Jimmy?"

"Why did I count my fingers?"

Sam laughs. "Because, runt, that's the _rules_."

Jimmy just stares, so Sam goes on. "When you cook, you gotta count your fingers before and after. So you know if you cut one off."

Jimmy's eyes go wide and he glances askance at Winona. She nods. "Don't blame me," she says. "My daddy made it up."

Jimmy still looks concerned, and she wonders if maybe he worries too much, if he gets enough light and sun and exercise. This isn't the life she hoped he'd have, not the life she and George had planned out for their boys. But then again, George had been **there** in those fantasies.

"I'll teach you next time," she tells him, "How to hold a knife, how to make sure you don't need to count fingers."

Jimmy nods, and Sam says something mildly taunting, and Winona remembers the pancake on her plate. She smiles down at it. Even if George isn't here, even if the simple act of making breakfast for dinner has taken an unprecedented toll on her body, there will always be this memory of her boys and of pancakes and uncounted fingers, there will always be the vague promise of "next time" and the fact that Jimmy doesn't flinch from it.

She lets the dishes sit when they're done, has Sam and Jimmy pile them in the sink and hopes she'll get to them tomorrow, but if not, well. They'll be there when she does. As a group they sit in front of the tridee to take in a show, and she finds herself drifting away in the smell of food that still lingers and the babble of the characters and the wiry hair at the crown of Sam's head. She closes her eyes for a minute. When she opens them again, the Yridian who does the 0100 show is talking to a vividly orange being about a movie she'll never see and her boys are pressed against her, Sam drooling a little and Jimmy snoring softly. She lays her head back against the sofa, and stares at the ceiling fan where it hangs still like a dormant tornado.

It's not the life she planned when she was young enough to think her plans mattered, but it's the life she has. Winona closes her eyes again, and she sleeps with a smile.


End file.
